This thesis is about the problem of compositionality in distributional
semantics. Distributional semantics presupposes that the meanings of words are
a function of their occurrences in textual contexts. It models words as
distributions over these contexts and represents them as vectors in high
dimensional spaces. The problem of compositionality for such models concerns
itself with how to produce representations for larger units of text by
composing the representations of smaller units of text.
This thesis focuses on a particular approach to this compositionality
problem, namely using the categorical framework developed by Coecke, Sadrzadeh,
and Clark, which combines syntactic analysis formalisms with distributional
semantic representations of meaning to produce syntactically motivated
composition operations. This thesis shows how this approach can be
theoretically extended and practically implemented to produce concrete
compositional distributional models of natural language semantics. It
furthermore demonstrates that such models can perform on par with, or better
than, other competing approaches in the field of natural language processing.
There are three principal contributions to computational linguistics in this
thesis. The first is to extend the DisCoCat framework on the syntactic front
and semantic front, incorporating a number of syntactic analysis formalisms and
providing learning procedures allowing for the generation of concrete
compositional distributional models. The second contribution is to evaluate the
models developed from the procedures presented here, showing that they
outperform other compositional distributional models present in the literature.
The third contribution is to show how using category theory to solve linguistic
problems forms a sound basis for research, illustrated by examples of work on
this topic, that also suggest directions for future research.

本文研究了分布语义学中的组合性问题，使用 Coek，Sadrzadeh 和 Clark 提出的范畴理论框架，将语法分析形式主义与分布语义表示法相结合，生成具体的组合式分布式模型，并展示它们在自然语言处理领域的有效性。研究的贡献包括将 DisCoCat 框架拓展到在句法和语义上，验证模型的优势以及提出了在本主题上应用范畴论的未来研究方向。